A Mountains Bane (The Fabled Elephants series; 2) by Alex DiPego

Book Blurb:

There is a dark presence at Poenari Castle. Shadow and Queen Midas have left Bayonne to investigate the rumored vampire presence. When they arrive, what they face is more than they have bargained for.
Shadow and Midas arrive at Poenari and find someone captured, Yui Fei. A man from the east with a fiery temper seeking revenge. Searching for his captor, Commander Radu, the group learns he is just a puppet for The Council. With the real threat revealed they must decide whether to team up, or face the worlds most dangerous evil apart.
A Mountains Bane is the second installment of The Fabled Elephants series. A real world fantasy in the heart of the Renaissance. If you enjoy vampires, fantastical locations, moving characters and high fantasy in your history books then you’ll love Alexander DiPego’s second book in The Fabled Elephants series.
Pick up A Mountains Bane today and lose yourself in a world of wonder.

I received this book from the author for the purpose of this review. All comments and opinions are entirely my own.

Review:

This is the latest alternate cover. There is another for this book.

Read my review of book one, When Elephants Fly here.

In this exciting sequel to When Elephants Fly, we rejoin Shadow and Queen Midas in this adventure that seems to unite all beings of all worlds in order to conquer evil.

Though I had enjoyed When Elephants Fly, I’m sorry to say that A Mountains Bane fell just below par for me. To begin, I know that sequels are hard to write and it’s common for sequels to be disappointing. And while A Mountains Bane isn’t disappointing in its characterization or fast-paced action, there were a few issues that I had with it.

This book really needed another set of eyes to edit it before it was published. The beauty of Indie publishing is that anyone can be published at the click of a button, but that is also the bane of Indie publishing. Even if it’s not a high dollar, award winning editor, it’s ALWAYS a good idea to get someone else — make sure they at least know the basics of English– to read over and try to catch typos. As the author, we mistype all the time and since we wrote the lines, many times our brains will read the story as we intended to write them, not as they are written. Authors cannot edit their own books, and even if all other expenses are spared in self-publishing, editing cannot be one of those! When Elephants Fly had many grammatical and word misuse errors as well, but this sequel has so many more that it eventually took all of my attention away from story and I wanted to edit it instead.

The other thing that I had difficulty with, is I truly had no idea what was going on with the story line. I needed a refresher chapter to remind me of what happened in the previous book, but even after browsing the first book to trigger my memory, I didn’t understand what any of the first book had to do with what was going on in the second book. There’s a missing link in the plot that either I just completely missed while reading, or it wasn’t included.

Aside from those two major issues, the action aspect of the book is great and the story line present is intense. I just never understood how it tied in to the first book. Content disclaimers include some mild cursing, significantly detailed gore, blood, pain, evil beings (vampires, undead, goblins, etc) and there is a gay couple encountered by the main characters, though there is no sexual content.

Overall, this is a book I would have loved to received before it was published to offer my suggestions to make it as shiny and sparkly as possible before being published, but as it is now I can’t recommend it to my followers because I “dnf”ed it at about 70%. I give it 1 star.